SEO audit

Smojoe SEO Audit

Smojoe's 8 step SEO Audit

Do you have an existing SEO strategy in place, but you’re not happy with the results? Or, would you simply like to get more out of your SEO campaign? If so, having an SEO audit is worthwhile to ensure that you have the right SEO strategy in place, both short and long-term, to rank well.

At Blueprint, there are eight key steps that we take to perform an audit for you. Let’s take a look at the eight steps.

SEO Audit Step 1 – Keyword review

The foundation of a successful SEO campaign is the actual keywords that your Website is optimized for. Some keywords are too competitive to go after, while others simply do not drive enough traffic, even if you are ranking well.

The key is to uncover keywords that can collectively drive enough traffic, while enabling you to rank well and maintain your ranking. As part of the keyword review, we not only analyze the keywords on your Website, but we also look at the long-tail keywords that you can go after through blog posts.

SEO Audit Step 2 – Competitor review

While a keyword review gives you some understanding of which keywords should be targeted, it’s also vital to have a deep understanding of your competitors strategies to understand what they are doing to rank well and what you can do to win the ranking war.

We review their Website structure, title tags, backlinks, blog, and other areas to get a complete understanding of how they are approaching things from an SEO perspective in your market.

If they are ranking better than you for certain keywords, we analyze what they are doing to outrank you and what you can do about it. At times, a competitor may have an effective SEO strategy in place that Google is rewarding. Since we know it works, we may recommend basing part of your SEO strategy on a winning formula, while adding additional SEO tactics to win the ranking war. This is why competitor analysis is so important. You want to ensure that your strategy is better than your competitors, instead of executing a strategy that is completely blind to what’s actually working in your market.

SEO Audit Step 3 – Website structure review

The structure of your Website is vital to the success of your SEO campaign. This means that you should have pages on your Website that are positioned from most important to least important on your Website’s hierarchy.

It’s also vital for the theme of your Website to be consistent. For example, if you have a Website that’s focused on hockey, then if you have additional pages on your Website that are about a completely unrelated topic, such as golf lessons, you may have a difficult time ranking for golf lessons.

At Blueprint, we review the structure of your Website as well as your competitors and compare your Website structure to the keywords that you would like to rank well for. Based on this analysis, we make recommendations regarding the best way to structure your Website to rank well for your most important keywords.

SEO Audit Step 4 – Social media review

While the impact of social media on SEO can be debated, we recommend including social media as part of your overall SEO campaign. Google continues to focus on quality and social media provides some clear signals regarding the quality of your content, which can only help your SEO campaign. It is for this reason that we integrate social media into our SEO campaigns and analyze the social networks of new clients and their competitors.

If your competitors are getting more +1s, likes, and shares, it’s a strong indication that they are focused on providing good quality content and engaging with their customers. This also means that you may have to follow suit to ensure that they do not have a competitive advantage both in terms of social media and SEO.

SEO Audit Step 5 – Content development strategy review

We often see Websites that are launched with a fixed number of Web pages with some on page optimization for SEO. Then, all of the monthly optimization is done through low quality link building. For the best possible result, both in terms of ranking and traffic, you want to continually add pages to your Website and blog, so that you rank for as many relevant keywords as possible.

The key is to increase the number of unique visitors that visit your Website month by month. This means that you need a sound content development strategy in place. And this is why we review your content development plan. If you don’t have one, we can develop one for you.

SEO Audit Step 6 – Link building strategy review

Link building is still an important part of an overall SEO campaign. It’s just a matter of going after high quality link building opportunities on a monthly basis, such as guest blog posts, outreach, and broken link building. We take the time to review your link building strategy and existing links, while comparing you to the competition to outline what it will take to beat your competitors from a link building perspective.

SEO Audit Step 7 – Authority review

Google and other search engines want to rank Websites with the highest authority, best quality content first. It’s that simple. There are different signals to help understand the authority that your company has versus the competition. Variables that impact your authority include your domain age, page rank, author rank, volume of backlinks, number of root domains, quality of content, as well as other variables. We review these elements to understand how you are currently positioned in your market versus your competition and outline what needs to be executed to improve your authority.

SEO Audit Step 8 – Coding review

The quality of the coding of your Website impacts your ranking because it dictates your page loading speed. Google wants pages to rank quickly to provide a good experience for users. As a matter of fact, they would like pages to start loading in less than one second on mobile devices. If your Website page loading speed is poor, it’s vital to fix the code on your Website to ensure that it loads efficiently. We take the time to review your code and page loading speed to ensure that you are doing everything you can to win the ranking war.